The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The Dewey Weber Classic was an early exercise in surfing nostalgia. People loved it. Surfer called the contest a “bitchin’ blast from the past!” and it inspired a small rush of copycat events. But these weekend get-togethers were just one indication of a bigger movement. All at once, everybody seemed to rediscover a truth that had gotten buried during the shortboard revolution: longboarding was fun. Furthermore, plus-size equipment made a lot of sense for middle-age surfers—who were turning up in ever-greater numbers. The longboard “revival” lasted throughout the 1980s and continued into the next decade. By 2000, the surfing population would be evenly split between shortboarders and longboarders. As surf journalist Steve Barilotti put it, the movement had become “a quiet coup.”

  The return of the longboard wasn’t surfing’s only back-to-the-future 1980s moment, either: big-wave riding returned, California got its smile back, and popular culture reembraced the sport. There were plenty of new and original developments as well, including the three-finned surfboard and a red-hot second generation of world-tour pros. But after spending a quarter century looking for its center, surfing now began to settle into what it had become: a bona fide competition-filled modern-era sport for a select few, and for the many, a gently countercultural recreation (lifestyle was still a popular word choice) removed almost entirely from points, ratings, and money.

  The Longboard Revival

  In hindsight, nothing in the sport’s history seems as logical or inevitable as a return to longboarding. But in 1970, with shortboard revolutionaries still waving the torches used to incinerate the previous era—which included not just longboards, but boom-age surf culture in its entirety—the idea was laughable. “Have you walked up to one of those antiques lately and tried to pick it up?” Surfing World magazine asked its readers in 1970. “Or for that matter, pictured yourself trying to actually ride one?” Yet the shortboard revolution was flawed. Tens of thousands of surfers became frustrated with the twitchy new boards, and the new hippie-heavy surf-world vibe, and gave up the sport altogether. Meanwhile, at surf breaks around the world, an endless stream of longboard-friendly waves—one-to-two-foot runners that didn’t quite have the energy to power up the latest equipment—rolled through untouched. The shortboard revolution was nearly as wasteful as it was exciting.

  In the fall of 1973, Surfer associate editor Kurt Ledterman wrote “Thinking Longer,” an opinion piece reminding everyone that those old boards—or the newer, lighter versions already turning up in retail showrooms—paddled like a dream and magically transformed little waves into something worth getting wet for. “Flash back to the past joys of the stall and a quick trip to the tip,” Ledterman wrote. “Restoke yourself to the delicate balance of trim.”

  By the mid-1970s, some people were doing just that. Ben Aipa of Hawaii was spending a lot of time on a 9-foot 6-inch noserider. Con Surfboards took out full-page magazine ads showing longboards and shortboards (“The Best of Both Worlds”), and a longboard division was added to the U.S. Surfing Championships’ schedule of events. Even Bob McTavish, the original shortboarder, began longboarding in small waves. “It’s much more fun than it looks,” he wrote in 1977, “and it looks like fun.”

  Over the next three or four years, a few hundred surfers worldwide became dedicated longboarders. Mostly, though, longboarding was something shortboarders did on a whim, usually on a hot, near-flat summer afternoon. Longboards were cheap and plentiful: Harbour Cheaters, Hansen Hustlers, Yater Spoons, and Bing Pipeliners—many of them in near-mint condition beneath the wax and grime—were priced at ten or twenty bucks at garage sales and swap meets. The spirit of early-revival longboarding echoed loudly in San Diego’s annual Stone Steps Invitational, a longboard-only event where each competitor, before each heat, had to chug an 82-ounce bucket of beer. There were five rounds, prelims to finals, plus live music, homemade trophies, and the inevitable afternoon nudity. Some entrants, like old-school longboard hero Donald Takayama, seemed to ride better as the event progressed. Others didn’t. “Upon hearing my named called for the next round,” one contestant recalled, “I staggered over to the judges table to present myself and scratch out of the heat.”

  After the 1981 Weber Classic, the longboard movement picked up speed. Windansea Surf Club reformed, as did other mothballed West Coast clubs. David Nuuhiwa, Herbie Fletcher, and other midsixties favorites were back on the scene, flanked by a new generation of full-time longboarders, including China Uemera of Hawaii, and California’s Paskowitz brothers, Israel and Jonathan, two of Dorian Paskowitz’s sons. Mike Eaton and Phil Becker headed up a small but growing list of American boardmakers who specialized in what were often referred to as “logs” or “tanks.” There were traditional longboarders, who generally used single-fins (often vintage) and rode in the classic midsixties style. And there were “progressive” or “modern” longboarders, who preferred lighter tri-fin models and mastered a few of the canonical moves—noseriding, drop-knee cutbacks—but rode as if they were using an oversized shortboard. Professional longboard contests were held, and in 1986 Australia’s Nat Young easily became the first pro-era longboard champion. Young was the brilliant, bellicose winner of the 1966 World Surfing Championships in San Diego—the last event of its kind to feature longboards—who then became a crusading early-convert shortboarder. His return to the fold was a crowning moment for the longboard revival’s opening phase.

  Young, McTavish, Nuuhiwa, Fletcher—they all said the same thing: longboarding was a return to “fun” surfing. Catching lots of waves, cross-stepping, spinners, no-effort trim—it was a blast, simple as that. But longboarders also used “fun” to hack away at localism, pro tour careerism, surfing religious metaphors, windy soul-surfing pieties, and all the rest of the accumulated seriousness that had grown like vines over the sport during the previous twenty years. In California, regional pride was involved, too. Sure, longboarding was a retro-trend. But California had more longboard surfers, clubs, and contests than anywhere in the world. The state was at last making a surfing comeback, and the longboard was a big part of it.

  LONGBOARD REVIVALIST BEN AIPA, WAIKIKI, 1979.

  * * *

  Longboarding was a friendlier, more democratic way to surf. People shared waves. They swapped boards. They talked more in the lineup. Except at the highest levels, boundary-pushing performance didn’t count for much. The riding characteristic longboarders valued above all others was glide, which was freely enjoyed not just by experts and intermediates but beginners as well. Longboarding was the only way to go if you were overweight or out of shape, and that included thousands of surfers who’d quit the sport in the late sixties and were now coming back. During the revival’s early years, longboarding seemed like an open-ended high school reunion. For the first time ever, the sport had a middle-aged—and generally upper-middle-class—market. Lawyers, real estate agents, and middle managers hit it hard on the weekends before their kids’ soccer games and were now among those who got up at 5 A.M. for the prework dawn patrol. In the 1970s, it was rare to find a surfer forty or older. Beginning in the mid-1980s, at some popular longboard breaks, most surfers were over forty. (Eighteen was probably the average age for a surfer during the original longboard era. By the turn of the century, it was likely getting close to thirty.)

  Nostalgia was a big part of longboarding. The returnees, after all, were baby-boomers, which meant they’d been rapturously celebrating their own past since the 1973 release of American Graffiti. Surf bands reformed to endlessly play “Walk Don’t Run” and “Pipeline.” Endless Summer, in 1984, became surfing’s first big VHS hit. Woodie wagons were back in style—restored and expensive this time around, instead of mangy and disposable—along with aloha shirts, ukuleles, competition stripes, and flower-print jams. Veneration of old surfers soon hit a point where any B-lister from the fifties or sixties could now be addressed as a “legend.” Also, because a lot of revivalists came back to the sport with disposable income, their surf nostalgia quickly manifested itself in
a collectibles market: that $15 garage-sale longboard find in 1979 was worth $300 by the late eighties, and the prices would skyrocket in the years to come.

  FOR A LOT OF YOUNG SURFERS, SHARING THE LINEUP WITH THESE MERRY MIDDLE-AGED LONGBOARD BUFFERS WAS LIKE SHARING A CLUB DANCE FLOOR WITH YOUR PARENTS.

  Much of this was wonderful. Elders were being honored, surfing reclaimed its past, and longboarders as a rule—older, more settled, better grounded than their shortboard counterparts—pursued the sport in a cheerful, good-natured manner. On the other hand, longboarders wedged themselves into a lot of already-crowded lineups, on boards that gave them a huge tactical advantage. If the longboard revival seemed all but predestined, so was the backlash that followed.

  First of all, it drove shortboarders crazy that they were so handicapped in terms of paddling speed. Not all longboarders were wave hogs, but plenty were. “Herbie Fletcher,” one frustrated late-seventies Southern California surfer recalled, “was every shortboarder’s worst nightmare, as he steamrolled past us and caught four waves to our one.” The longboarder’s “fun” mantra also became a sore point. Of course it’s fun, the counterargument went. It’s easy. The rewards and pleasures of shortboarding were in part distilled from the great amounts of practice, timing, and concentration it required. On a longboard, you just . . . point and go. As the number of longboarders went up, so too did the belief among shortboarders that theirs was the higher, superior form of wave-riding.

  Surfing’s cool quotient took a hit, too. “There’s a prevailing notion that as surfers age they mutate into walruses,” surf journalist Steve Barilotti wrote. “The mustaches grow long and gray, the eyes crinkle to rheumy slits, and they begin to bark and puff their way around the lineup, shipping their magnificent sleek bellies about on great bargey logs.” Surfers were supposed to be young, fit, and daring—you did it in part to get away from adults. Longboarding made the sport older, slower, balder, and heavier. For a lot of young surfers, sharing the lineup with these merry middle-aged buffers was like sharing a club dance floor with your parents.

  Violence wasn’t part of the longboard/shortboard divide, or at least not like it was with locals and nonlocals. There was plenty of mocking humor, though. One late-eighties T-shirt had a thumbs-up sign on the chest and the word “Shortboarders”; on the back, just below a huge raised middle-finger, was printed “Longboarders.” Often, the two groups just went to their separate corners. It wasn’t written in stone, but places like First Point Malibu, First Point Noosa Heads, Queen’s Surf in Waikiki—smaller, softer, high-quality waves—became known as longboard waves, with the understanding that nearby breaks—Third Point Malibu, Boiling Pot at Noosa, and Waikiki’s Ala Moana, for example—were for shortboarding.

  At some level, people understood that differences between the two groups had nothing to do with equipment choice. Surfers had felt pinched for waves since the 1950s, and it was always convenient to blame the shortfall on one group or another—newcomers, inlanders, nonlocals, bodyboarders. Lashing out at other groups, even if just for a laugh, had in fact become reflexive. So when longboarders began turning up in significant numbers, the sport automatically reacted with its habitual practice of dividing against itself. “Longboarding Today,” a peacemaking 1992 Surfer magazine article, noted that “a longboarder can be anybody now: your dad, your son, your friends, your heroes.” Prior to the introduction of subdemographic magazines like Longboard or Pacific Longboarder, Surfer had been the sport’s most longboard-friendly voice—partly because its roots were sunk so deep into what was now referred to as the “classic” longboard era, and partly because Surfer viewed itself as more egalitarian than its competitors. But in “Longboarding Today,” the magazine couldn’t help itself. “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” the final sentence reads. “And he is riding a very big board.”

  Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

  In April 1981, just a few weeks before the Dewey Weber Longboard Classic, an oversized Aussie pro surfer and boardmaker named Simon Anderson walked toward the shorebreak at Bells Beach holding a new type of board he’d winkingly called the “Thruster.” It was a peculiar-looking craft, with a narrow nose and three small fins placed in a triangular cluster near the tail. There was no reason to think that the Thruster was any different than the hundred or so weird design ideas that had come and gone over the past fifteen years. But Anderson was about to prove that this was something very different indeed. The tri-fin became the biggest surfboard design breakthrough since the shortboard revolution.

  SIMON ANDERSON AND ONE OF HIS FIRST THRUSTERS, 1981.

  At age twenty-six, Anderson seemed on the downside of a commendable if low-key pro surfing career. He’d been introduced to the surf world in 1977, four years earlier, as the sport’s laziest and most likeable pro after back-to-back world tour wins gave him a number-three year-end ranking. Surf journalist Paul Holmes called the six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound surfer a “benign bear,” and noted that Anderson sat down for his interview “unshaven, hair uncombed and salt-saturated, and dressed in a sloppy and unmistakably beer-spattered track suit.” World-tour travel didn’t suit Anderson, however, nor did the new twin-fin boards, which went squirrelly beneath Anderson’s powerful, four-square riding style. Over the next two years he mostly stayed home in Narrabeen and shaped for his Energy Surfboards company. In 1980 he again applied himself to the tour, finished the year at number six, and began to think about crafting a new kind of board that would give him a competitive edge—just as Mark Richards had done three years earlier with the twin-fin. In early 1981, he came up with the Thruster.

  The most distinctive feature of Anderson’s new board was a stabilizing third fin, placed behind the side fins, on the stringer, just a couple of inches from the back end. Three-finned boards weren’t unheard of: Dick Brewer and Reno Abellira of Hawaii had designed a version in 1970 that featured a regularsized middle fin flanked by a pair of small half-moon “finlets.” Two years later, Malcolm and Duncan Campbell, teenaged brothers from Ventura, California, introduced a design called the “Bonzer” (Aussie slang for “great”), with deep concave channels on the bottom, a regular single fin, and a pair of long keel-like side fins. The Brewer-Abellira tri-fin never caught on. The Bonzer was hot for a few months, then disappeared, then eventually came back as a niche-market favorite.

  By the late seventies, a few surfers were adding a half-size “trailing” fin to their Richards-style twin-fins. Frank Williams, a longtime Narrabeen surfer and boardmaker, thought this was a good set-up, and in October 1980 he showed his board to Anderson. By week’s end, Anderson had built his first tri-fin prototype. Just three weeks after that, having tweaked the design, he had the very hybrid he’d been looking for. It planed and held its turning speed like a twin-fin. But it had the traction and drive of a single-fin. Anderson was a little puzzled at how well the board worked. He hadn’t exactly slapped it together—but there hadn’t been much trial and error involved, either.

  On the beach, and back home, Anderson spent a lot of time just looking at his board, trying to figure it out. To begin with, the fins seemed too small. A regular single-fin was about 8 inches tall. Twin-fins were 6 inches. Anderson had ground the new fins down to 4 inches. It was a trick of the eye, but it just didn’t seem as if there was enough combined area to keep the board on track during a big, floorboarding turn—yet the board actually seemed to grip better than a single-fin. The nose looked funny, too. Anderson copied the tri-fin’s outline in part from the “needle-nose” board introduced a few months earlier by fellow Aussie shaper Geoff McCoy. Also called the “no-nose” (or the McCoy-patented Lazer-Zap), the design featured low hips, an attenuated narrow-based single fin, and a wickedly long and pointed front end. It was a quick-turning wonder in small waves, more like a skateboard than a surfboard, but couldn’t hold a sustained turn or even a sustained trim line, and was completely useless in bigger surf. On its own, the needle-nose was an interesting misfire. On Anderson’s new board, it be
came an essential component. The reduced forward area—not quite as extreme as the McCoy template, but narrower by inches compared to anything else out there—balanced out the stiffer handling brought on by the cluster of fins.

  What Anderson did, in other words, was pull a tail design halfway out of thin air and patch it together with another shaper’s failed bit of nose design. So far at least, the board worked incredibly well. And the longer Anderson looked at it, the less strange it seemed.

  * * *

  Anderson called his new board the “Thruster.” He claimed it wasn’t a sexual double entendre. Nobody believed him.

  After selling a dozen or so Thrusters to the local lads, all of whom gave the new design rave reviews, Anderson decided in early 1981 that it was time to take the board to market. He packed up some Thrusters, flew to America, positive the board would sell itself—and was nearly laughed back across the Pacific. At the Surf Expo trade show in Florida he took orders for a grand total of three surfboards. At the Katin Pro-Am in Huntington Beach, Anderson not only lost early (all four finalist were on twin-fins), but was lightly heckled by his world-tour buddies for riding a novelty board. The early verdict: sure, Anderson can ride the thing. He’s a top-ten pro. But we’ve already got singles and twins—who needs a third fin?

  SIMON ANDERSON, NARRABEEN.

  Anderson was still convinced that the Thruster was the best thing to come down the chute in years, and he flew back to Sydney feeling like an injustice had been done—to himself, but mostly to his new board. Then again, he hadn’t shown it off very well or done much marketing. What he needed, Anderson realized, was the kind of attention he’d received in 1977, after his back-to-back IPS wins. The Aussie leg of the 1981 pro tour began in one month. Three events: the Stubbies, Bells, and the Coke. What would happen, Anderson idly wondered, if he took the lot?